Microsoft researcher: Surface to become ‘no thicker than a sheet of glass’

The beauty of the Microsoft Surface is that it not only displays things, it can “see” things. Place a specially tagged object on the table and Surface knows what it is. Throw a family photo on there and Surface can scan it.

Buxton

The downside? Microsoft Surface is a huge, “Mrs. Pac-Man“-like table that costs $10,000.

Bill Buxton, an influential principal researcher for Microsoft, thinks Surface technology will be available in an affordable device “no thicker than a sheet of glass” — within three years.

“Right now it has five cameras in it and a projector and a bunch of other stuff,” Buxton told The (Toronto) Globe and Mail last month. “It’s just a lot. What will happen is that Surface will become no thicker than a sheet of glass. That will more or less be true. It’s not going to have any cameras or projectors because the cameras will be embedded in the device itself.”

How? Take your average liquid-crystal display (LCD). It uses thousands of pixels — red, green and blue — to build the digital images you can see. Now, Buxton said, imagine there’s a third type of pixel that doesn’t emit light, but captures light and sends that data back to the device.

“And because of that bidirectional attribute and the fact that they’re horizontal, this technology will augment and enhance in a dramatic way the nature of games,” he said. “It’s a very different thing to play a board game or checkers on a table like this. Even Dungeons and Dragons. You can have the whole table animated because the table can read the dice and recognize the characters and pieces. It will really transform the way we play games.”

Buxton seems to still be thinking of a table. But I could see this technology pop up in a tablet, couldn’t you?

In this November 2009 video, Buxton discusses Surface and the “natural user interface.”